Letter: Sowell's latest column an embarrassment

I am embarrassed that Thomas Sowell's column continues in our newspaper. His piece on cease-fires in Israel-Palestine betrays either a simple ignorance of history — awkward for a "senior fellow" at Stanford — or an elitism and discounting of Palestinian people that many would call racist.

His conclusion that Israel is "far more advanced" than its neighbors and that these neighbors are primarily motivated by an offense to their egos is demeaning and shallow as an account of the complex conflict there. His suggestion that John Kerry and Barack Obama have ignored past history in their work for a cease-fire may have merit but not in the way he suggests. It is his position that betrays the shallowest of accounts of this history, applying a simplistic version of the "realist" approach to conflict that says if we just bomb the "bad guys" we'll have peace.

He asks: What do Israel's critics expect — for Israel to "suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East? No, Israel's critics expect Israel to observe international law, grant human rights to the people it holds under occupation, allow the free flow of goods into Gaza, stop the expansion of settlements and the intrusion of its "wall" into land the world recognizes as Palestinian, observe internationally agreed constraints to protect noncombatants, give up the exceptionalism that U.S. backing has allowed, and join the community of nations.

Please give us a more civil voice in your conservative columnists, and invite Sowell into retirement.